Bracknell Noir

On The Offence for 3am Magazine's 'Saturday Night at the Movies' series. The Youtube clip I chose was selected advisedly, as the only other one is this. Here is a guide to the locations used.

Camberwell Now

What is intended as a non-knee jerk, tentative column on the fire at Sceaux Gardens in BD. An interesting article about this in Socialist Worker too, which despite some debatable architectural points actually goes into depth on the neglect and cutbacks that have beset the estate; see also the original review of the estate at the Architects Journal; not as rapturous as Ian Nairn, a very hard critic to impress, who wrote when it was built that 'for once, an estate has become a place'. Which will obviously be scant consolation now. And, not solely for the sake of my usual attempts to link any event of note to my obsessions but as evidence that the place was once thought romantic, it's the place you can see in the video above, headed up by the caption 'setting'.

Indefensible Space

Another link to Spillway - a photo-essay on the terrifying security landscape created around the Olympic site, documenting the relentless advance of the new Gothic architecture discovered by Patrick Keiller in Robinson in Space, made up of ubiquitous fences, barbed wire, labyrinthine security walls, walls topped by broken glass, with unnerving new space - there big sheds, here seemingly empty waterside luxury flats (featuring possibly the worst example I've ever seen). This links with one of the most brilliant, and unexpected points of Anna Minton's excellent new book Ground Control (reviewed by me for the NS, link soonish) - a passionate, convincing attack on one of the most accepted, cliched ideas about urban planning since the early '70s, Oscar Newman's theory of 'defensible space'. She introduces this by mentioning a housing association project which Hans Van der Heijden of BIQ Architecten worked on in Liverpool. They planned a 'continental' development, and were told in no uncertain terms that, according to police-led Secured by Design policies which have to be followed to get planning approval, the development must 'be surrounded by walls with sharp steel pins or broken glass on top of them, CCTV, and only one gate into the estate'. Despite having the support of residents, they were sacked from the project and something containing all of the above was built in its place.

Minton argues that defensible space, the attempt to design away crime from new developments, something equally prevalent in gated communities and in the housing association-run remnants of social housing, is a paranoid assault on the polis, a form of negative determinism (perhaps to complement the negative determinism of the modernists who tried to design community into estates). Rather than obliterating fear, by closing off an area and filling it with security paraphernalia, defensible space (and its state form as Secured by Design) creates fear. Interestingly, given that both Jane Jacobs and Oscar Newman were very popular among postmodernists, she contrasts it with her idea of 'eyes on the street' from The Life and Death of Great American Cities, where strangers should be welcomed into the urban district and the housing development rather than repelled with the Orwellian apparatus of spikes and cameras that dominates British cities; patterned on the grid, rather than the cul-de-sac. It's odd, really, that this pessimistic, paranoid form of urbanism has been so popular for so long, its applicability being extended from the New York projects studied by Newman to the whole of the UK. There's sadly little acknowledgment of the only seemingly converse Urban Task Force approach of pedestrianized piazzas and overpriced coffee chains, which were frequently in the privately-owned 'Business Improvement Districts' expertly critiqued elsewhere in the book.

Addenda: although Minton doesn't write much about aesthetics, it occurred to me that the visual equivalent of Newman's ideas might be the notions of architectural legibility proposed in Alice Coleman's Utopia on Trial. Making a frontal assault on Modernism in toto, suggesting, rather extraordinarily (I don't want to bring up the Barbican again, but...) that crime increases the taller the building, her influence was brought to bear on actual housing design in Britain in the 1990s, and the results can be best seen in what Cedric Price called the 'pathetic Colemanville' of the area just behind Park Hill in Sheffield, and in the semis built by Liverpool's Militant council. It's extraordinary that Marxists were taken in by such a superficial, anti-materialist analysis - essentially, that buildings that don't look traditional are alienating, that height equals blight - when the problems of estates are mostly social rather than architectural, as the many estates of 30s semis built by local councils with fearsome reputations (Manor in Sheffield, Wynthenshawe, Flower Estate Soton) can attest. It's intriguingly stupid, what was done in the Hyde Park area. Modernist terraces and flats reclad, alternately in vernacular brick and postmodernist plastic, and even architecturally pretty conservative '30s tenements reclad to make them more 'friendly', while the streets-in-the-sky of Hyde Park were enclosed and closely guarded, making it a decidedly hostile place, according to an ex-resident of Sheffield's three streets-in-the-sky schemes - and in the process, a world-famous symbol of confidence and futurism was transformed into a provincial mess.

Chips

A chip-themed post on me, by I.T. Am indescribably flattered.

Wonk Policy

I was once utterly obsessed with pop music, and my flatmate likes to wind me up by implying I don't care about it anymore, and am gradually devolving into a one-album-a-year type. The last time I really cared about a New Music rather than listening to burnt CDs of old Isaac Hayes, Wu-Tang and Cabaret Voltaire albums was Grime and to a slightly lesser extent Cologne Techno, about five years ago in each case. My attention has been briefly grabbed since, by the Northern bass-noise-pop of bassline house for a time, but never, ever, with the token exception of Burial's second album, have I cared a jot for Dubstep. Not because it's full of people like me - personally I prefer not to have a pall of menace around where I spend an evening, I had enough of that as a teenager, thanks - but because it's so fucking dull. It suggested drum and bass if it had only ever been the music it had turned into by 1998, a ponderous stonerstep for slovenly, unshaven UCL science students in expensive rainwear. I thought it was boring when Slimzee started playing it on Rinse FM in 2003, I thought it was boring when Rephlex jumped the gun with the nomenclature, and I thought it was dull when I went to FWD for the first and last time in 2004; why listen to this when you could have instead the sonic imagination, the futurist melodrama of Ruff Sqwad?.

So my attention was not attracted by that-which-we-cannot-call-wonky, early on, as I assumed it was another facet of this wholly uninteresting scene. Further investigation made clear that while some was predictable pomo stuff some of it was rather exciting, a bizarre lolloping G-Funk made up of bright, wilfully tasteless synth squiggles. You could actually imagine dancing to it. Another Joker track, 'Digidesign' (above) got me even more excited, sounding like a vision of Asian megacities rising out of dubstep's Brixton squats, of the signifiers of the urban moody being rejected in favour of the urban sublime. So after raving about this elsewhere I was very kindly sent a link by the blogosphere's favourite buffoon empiricist Dan Hancox to a recent mix by Guido, and after managing to put down my hackles - the producer is called Guido, for God's sake, an unshaven Tolkein-referencing Bristolian - there are fine things there, albeit amidst some tracks which evoke a straining for drama reminiscent of incidental music to SNES games. The best things here sound like they're picking up from the luridly synthesised Sinophile grime of 2003 - Jammer, Terror Danjah - with gunplay removed and funk transfused: Guido, Aarya and Ruthless's 'Beautiful Complication' (also above) is a particular joy, a teen-pop melodrama in garishly artificial synth and genetically modified R&B vocals. It's a bit sad that it's been mainly the preserve of those hostile to theory or writing about music rather than scene politics - if this music takes off from the dynamism and drama of the tracks above and leaves its torpid roots behind, there could be something here truly worth overheated prose and grandiose theorisation.

Brutalism, friend of the Pedestrian

Near the end of his criminally out-of-print 1966 study The New Brutalism, Reyner Banham, clearly disappointed that the architectural non-aesthetic he had praised so much had developed not into the architecture autre he hoped for but transmogrified into sophisticated masterpieces of proper architecture like the Leicester Engineering and Economist Buildings, listed the things which dated Brutalism, which meant that even then it seemed passe compared with the Fun Palaces and Walking Cities. Brutalism, he notes, is an architecture that abhors the motor car. 'The ethic of the Brutalist connection in architecture, like every reformist trend in architecture...is backward looking. It may make tremendous bold attempts to keep the automobile under control, but in the last resort it is to recreate a pedestrian city, as in the central plaza of Siedlung Halen, the street-decks of Park Hill.' Making such a hard and fast distinction between what is backward and what is progressive is often rather foolhardy, as history has a knack of being surprising. While for Banham the autopia of LA was Progressive, we can't be so sure. Signified in the UK by the point in the '70s related in Joe Moran's On Roads when, to the horror of the motoring lobby, the InterCity trains surpassed the motorways in speed, the car is no longer 'progressive'. In any sensible society it would be all but obsolete, a privatised mode of motion which not only carries rates of death in its wake that would never be accepted on any other kind of transport, but which carries in its train a landscape of endless sheds, retail parks and malls which, for all its cold fascination, is not one which even its defenders can be bothered to make a serious case for.

Brutalism's most retrograde element, its attempt to 'recreate' a city for the pedestrian, must now strike us as its most progressive aspect - especially as it is precisely in these pedestrian spaces that Brutalism created a genuinely new space, a new way of moving around the city. Rather than the idealised main street bafflingly turned into a model for all to follow (see this atrocity for a case in point), the Brutalist city of skywalks, under and overpasses and lakeside cafes makes the mundane act of getting from A to B exciting. This is something brought up in In Praise of Beech Street, a post on the Barbican's semi-secret underpass at Will Wiles' fine new blog Spillway. That was in response to a typically irritating post at Oobject, a sort of regular digest of high-in-pics low-in-thought design capitalist realism (eww housing projects! eww statism!), which took issue with New York's newly reopened Highline, because, um, it's not a proper street. This idiot version of Jane Jacobs is depressingly prevalent in urban design circles. Surely at least one reason for the enduring crapness of all the bland Plazas of the abortive 'urban renaissance', with their branches of Costa and optimistic seating spilling out onto the pavement was their spatial conservatism - everything always boringly tied to the ground, presumably with the knowledge that if we get light on our feet then we might not open our purses.

Critics and consumers alike seem to will any attempt to elevate everyday life to failure, anything that lifts us off away from the proximity of a coffee concession being some sort of mockery of the neoliberal city. Whether its the demolished walkways of innumerable council estates (usually for 'security' reasons, though it's moot whether they lead to endemic crime at the Barbican) to the imminent demise of Sheffield's multi-level tat extravaganza Castle Market (wonderfully, Sheffield City Council once planned to throw walkways over the whole Sheaf Valley), the attempt to create a pedestrian city that doesn't stay at a base level has become unpopular just at the point where it would seem most relevant, where it would make a (holds breath) sustainable urbanism something invigoratingly modern rather than tweedily conservative. It has been relatively intriguing, in the arid world of oligarchitecture, to see the reaction to Steven Holl's Beijing Linked Hybrid - not because it looks like it'll be a formally interesting building in itself, but because here the walkway has come back, and this seems to many critics to be an unforgivable urban faux pas. A perusal of the Skybridge-Skywalk-Skyway group on Flickr is a fine reminder that walkways, skyways, the excitement of multiple levels and a Metropolis worthy of the term are wholly part of the future we were promised and denied. Rather than sharing our streets with cars, we should be building car free streets in the air, from which we can rain down eggs and rotten vegetables on said cars.

British Hospital in Hot Weather

My synapses are perhaps still too frazzled by a week of freakish, oppressive weather (during which I realise I am in no way going to enjoy global warming) and of heavy prescription painkillers to write a coherent post, but here goes. My latest sojourn to my PFI hospital in exurbia took me to the daycare ward, although I had been told I would be in overnight. The waiting room had built-in plastic seating uncannily akin to that of Star Express (which might be a more appropriate concession than the obligatory branch of Upper Crust), and after a shorter than usual period of milling around on nil by mouth I was ushered into the ward. I was to be in the corner, in a bed which seemed bizarrely thin, even for one as streak-of-piss-like as myself, where I would be overlooked by a poster for The Rugrats Movie and several cuddly toys of sundry animals. I assumed this was the children's ward, although with the general infantilisation that accompanies hospitalisation I couldn't be certain. The radio in the corner played Michael Jackson hits interspersed with the usual fare (Spandau Ballet's 'True' - and this before the painkillers). Despite the overwhelming brightness outside, the artificial strip-lighting of the ward cancelled out the dangerous notion of 'natural light'.

After a few hours of the obligatory stay of operation enlivened by being brought magazines by the inestimable IT, I was taken in to the anaesthetic room - which, even in this blistering heat, was icily cold. The last time this happened I spent a while afterwards in a half-conscious haze that was a bit terrifying, so this was nice and clean - woke up in the bed, in the ward, rather than in some vague surgical place or in a lift - and with the consoling visages of the Rugrats looking over me. Before I could contemplate further the dubious promise of a night on strong analgesics and tranquilisers looked over by cartoon children teetering atop the Eiffel Tower I was hustled out of the bed by hospital staff, without even a fresh batch of happy pills to take home with me. Since then I've been in far more pain than after the previous two operations, but whether the two are connected I can't say. I can only assume the hospital was being readied for the spectacular crisis that would befall a north Kent trying to cope with a heatwave...

Under the Knife

...or at least I will be, in a far less dramatic and more mundane manner than the gentleman discussed below, tomorrow (for similar reasons to last time). Surrogate grapes to the usual address.

We are the only World

Post by request of Mark K-Punk, whose piece on Jackson is far better than any of the innumerable memorials and hand-wringings of the last couple of days. I could have written about the extraordinarily strange mutations and transfigurations of the Moonwalker film, but I'm hoping Alex will do that...

In 1995, there were statues of Michael Jackson being floated up the Thames, to promote the portentously named HIStory - Past, Present and Future Part One. Apparently they were placed in other prominent places around the world at the same time. One wag in a music magazine - I think it was the late Select - wrote that rather than the then self-described 'King of Pop', what we were dealing with here was the Stalin of Pop. Just five years after the statues of Ceaucescu or Dzherzhinsky were falling, Jackson was erecting (presumably fibre glass) colossi of himself everywhere. This was not a new phenomenon. Look at the picture above. What Jackson actually looks like here is some glam version of Tito, or Idi Amin, or Jean-Bedel Bokassa, come to visit the Reagans in order to negotiate the exchange of hostages or the commencement of detente. At the same time he was writing such horrendous outpourings of messianic capitalist realist sentiment as 'We are the World', 'Heal the World' and 'Earth Song', this globe-bestriding colossus was specifically dressing like a totalitarian. In a sense, after he ceased to be the the vividly talented young black man hymned in Mark's post and became an embodiment of the Reagan-era's Integrated Spectacle, he seemed to become weirdly nostalgic for the very Evil Empires Reagan would claim credit for destroying.

This is appropriate, in a weird way, as Gary, the planned rust-belt town where his abusive father was a crane-operator in a steel mill, was taken as a model for the Soviets in their single-industry Fordist industrial new towns such as Magnitogorsk. Long, long after he knew he would never have to enter the steel mills and production lines, the mutation of that world into Stalinism formed a sort of posthumous point of identification for his most haunting post-Thriller song, perhaps the only one that is actually affecting rather than a simulation of affect, 'Stranger in Moscow'. The lyrics here are the usual elliptical mess of tics, paranoia and self-pity you would expect, meaning that the premise is tricky to untangle. Nonetheless, what seems to be happening here is a dream of an outside to the Konsumterror Jackson epitomised - the world of 'actually existing socialism', a cold and severe world without Pop which is also the only imaginable society where nobody would know who he is, where he could actually be a stranger rather than the creature that was, for us born in the '80s, as real a person as Jesus, ET or Santa Claus. Jackson dreams of the world that no longer existed by 1995, the world that he himself had helped to close off - we are the world, there is only one possible world. Yet he can't sustain the fantasy here, either, and it collapses back into the late capitalist media circus, and we know who he is clumsily referring to when he sings 'the KGB are doggin' me'. Yet, in a line which you should remember is sung by someone having statues cast of himself, he trills 'Stalin's tomb won't let me be'. Fittingly at the end, just like Stalin, there seems to have been a Doctor's Plot. In terms of lifelong fame, limitless but profoundly unsatisfying power and presumably endless guilt, the only man who probably knows how Michael Jackson felt near the end is Kim Jong-Il.

Tyneside Addenda

Me on Newcastle, Gateshead and Killingworth in BD. There are two very good things about this area which are not shared by many English cities. The first is, as mentioned, the planned centre - odd to have something this good named after a property developer, or to imagine that all this dark classicism was part of a speculative development - and Grainger was apparently not a very efficient speculator, running up massive debts and risks. Regardless, the end result is that, like Glasgow, Newcastle looks like a city that actually had an Enlightenment as well as industrial capitalism, something that certainly can't be said about Manchester or (pre-1953, post-1987) Sheffield. Squaring this with the city I have read about in Viz for the last 20 years is difficult, at least until you see the remarkable women with their minuscule skirts, enormous heels and imperviousness to cold, and their lunk-headed, shirt & chinos male charges, emerge at around 9pm. Nonetheless, even some awful Malls and Farrell's egregious 'Centre for Life' can't spoil the centre of Newcastle, and the best post-war parts of it - the Civic Centre, MEA House and its walkways - seem to fit into it neatly. Even the accidents have a certain serendipity. Viz:

The other great thing about the conurbation is the Metro, and it's amazing that it is this city - smaller than Birmingham, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds - that has this basic urban amenity denied from all other British cities save Glasgow and the capital. It has more than a passing resemblance to the U-Bahn, with spacious, tile-clad subterranean stations at the centre and outright weirdness further out where it consumes earlier rail lines, such as the alternately painted and picturesquely rusting ironwork of Tynemouth. There might, perhaps, be some rebuilding of the UK's many closed rail lines soon, and we can only hope the Metro's curious combination of antique and futuristic serves as a model - not only because its one of the few still-unprivatised parts of our transport network, although that's not for want of trying. The Metro has lots of public art of varying quality. One station had this sign inside:

If it were only for this, and the succession of increasingly more powerful, more dizzyingly Constructivist bridges along the Tyne, culminating in the Tyne Bridge and the High Level Bridge, both of them better than any bridge over the Thames, the area would be worth visiting, and there's something insufferably patronising about the idea that a city like this needed to be made more like Bilbao/Barcelona/London (delete as appropriate). Our initial plan was to search for the city of T Dan Smith, and - although out of his immediate jurisdiction - this brought us to the New Town of Killingworth. This really is a deeply strange place, where the remnants of a suburban Modernism coexist with the familiar limbo of spec homes and malls - all of which replaced a series of linked towers Pevsner (or whoever was standing in on the Northumbria guide) likened to Metropolis, an office block on stilts and a modernist shopping centre - its current, timelessly boring incarnation had to efface something more interesting first. In the middle of the 'township' is the obligatory artificial lake, with on one side some small, incredibly narrowly planned houses by Ralph Erskine, with paths that could get you lost even in this small space, and on the other side the faded slickness of Ryder and Yates' Norgas House, below. The more famous building they did here is this place, which was across the road from a bus stop so we could contemplate it for some time. The fencing around it was taking no chances whatsoever.

The more interesting Erskine thing is obviously Byker Wall and environs, which in a cut line I described as the midpoint between Park Hill and FAT - as this is a Modernist monument based on montage and consultation rather than masterplanning's imperiousness, with odd leftover details from the slums it replaced forming the area's only really postmodernist element, but reatining a sweep, a confidence, modernity and interest in sublime scale combined with small-scale intimacy that housing from the '80s onwards would completely abandon. It's especially weird that it gets bracketed with the terminally dull housing association architecture of the 70s and 80s - this couldn't be further from the aesthetic cowardice of Coin Street and its ilk. And much as it would have been difficult by the 70s to see the utopian aspirations of Butskellist architecture, it's now hard to see the originality of Byker, as the formal language has been borrowed by all manner of horrors. But what was especially interesting about the area was the way the estate abuts what looks like the remnants of a canal, now landscaped into a pedestrian path towards the Tyne, inexplicably punctuated by these sheds (pigeon coops? Allotments?)

...which either borrowed the colours and styles used by Erskine or were borrowed by him. When you get out at the other end you're at this school, which was apparently designed as a gesture to the Japanese businessmen who regularly visited this allegedly provincial city in the late 19th century.

In Gateshead we went looking for the barely-clinging-on buildings by Owen Luder, largely designed by Rodney Gordon (I believe that's the appropriate circumlocution), such as the carpark, which looked incredible in the (torrential) rain, and the almost as staggering Dunston Rocket, which resembles no other tower I've seen. When we were looking for the tower's entrance we were stopped by a middle aged couple in their front garden, in the maisonettes which surround the tower. They asked if we wanted to take a pic of their front door, and we did. They were the at the last part of the estate to be cleared, and were not best pleased about being forced to move from where they'd lived for 26 years, and spoke well of the flats' space and how much they were liked after they were built. They said they'd been told they would have priority for being moved to the 'townhouses' that were being planned. Whether any council should be trusted on such a commitment is unlikely...Then we walked to the Wayne Hemingway-sponsored spec houses of 'Staiths South Bank', where luxury and individuality are enclosed by a gasworks, lots of industrial sheds and the ornamental ex-industry of the Dunston Staiths. If this bridge

was open we would have walked there directly, but not only was it fenced off, the area had a certain hint of dubiousness about it. Working Men's Clubs with extremely expensive looking cars parked outside. Of all the cities we've been to, this was the first where we got funny looks for taking photographs. Not hostile, but more 'not seen you in the Dun Cow'. We were intent on visiting the Metro Centre, largest mall in the EU, which we found almost charmingly dated - I went here at the age of 10ish and, even though I have no specific memories of it, I felt I'd been there a thousand times. It is marked by a wonderfully contradictory tension between two models of non-place. On the one hand, the theme park approach most popular in the 1980s, with the central 'Village' even featuring a Parish Chapel, the 'building' here with the green sign.

The land on which the Metro Centre is built is owned by the church, strongly supporting The Pop Group's claim that 'department stores are our new Cathedrals'. This ridiculousness has seemingly absolutely nothing in common with the Metro Centre's new bus station by Jefferson Sheard, a Northern firm who did some fantastic Brutalist things in '60s Sheffield.

This really did feel Cathedral-like in the sense of vast enclosure, while the Metro Centre itself, for all its hugeness, always feels poky and claustrophobic, always resists making the pedestrian aware of its scale. In that it's like the 'community architecture' with which Byker is inexplicably lumped, refusing to do any of the things with space and scale that you can do with the form, instead basically creating a series of rooms where you can shop and eat (we had a Tex-Mex buffet, incidentally). It's afraid of itself, of its own enormity. By comparison the bus station is a Fosterian canopy seemingly designed for the personal edification of Marc Auge, which was playing Elgar, loudly, and almost certainly as a means of dissuading youth from loitering there. The Metro Centre is not connected to the Metro transport system, and it's telling that, both built in the '80s, these two Metros describe the consumerist tedium we've inflicted on ourselves, and a possible way out.

The Music of the Korova Milkbar

Not intending this to become a local history blog or anything, but perusing the 'People from Southampton' list on Wikipedia I was intrigued to find Allen Jones on the list. As someone who considers A Clockwork Orange a sort of key for understanding the built environment, I mainly know him as the designer of the forniphiliac sculptures 'Chair, Table and Hatstand', where sexualised, fetishwear-clad mannequins are turned into chic and sinister furniture. Kubrick approached Jones to design the furniture that adorns the Korova Milkbar in a similar vein, but he refused, meaning that the objects in question are significantly less terrifying than Jones' original (commissioned, not sculpted) sculptures, with a hint of kitsch compared to his chilling mannequins. These were damned through most of the '70s as misogynistic, which is a difficult charge to refute - though Jones has always insisted that he is a feminist, and that the works are more a commentary on oppression rather than a celebration - nonetheless, what they seem to be is a commentary on a particular strain in Modernism, the sex appeal of the inorganic.

There's something wonderfully appropriate about the fact that one of Jones' sculptures - sadly, not from the furniture series - adorns the atrium of the building that JG Ballard claimed could make you a more advanced human being, Michael Manser's Heathrow Hilton, as these are episodes from the same process of disassociation as The Atrocity Exhibition, the point about them is the proximity, the way that the inorganic simulation of flesh intersects with the straightforwardly artificial, precisely, mechanically cut glass of the tables. They suggest the fashion photography and, later, vaguely pornographic postcards collected by Le Corbusier and used as an eventual plastic source, only with all of Corbusier's would-be peasant earthiness purged and replaced with glacial bloodlessness. The fact that these objects were ever taken as unambiguously 'sexy' is curious in itself, and inescapably reminiscent of another seemingly irreconcilable paradox in music. That is, that Bass, the most straightforwardly, dumbly lubricious music you're ever likely to find, an entire genre essentially based around worship of the female posterior, is largely rhythmically based around Kraftwerk's 'Numbers', a mathematically precise music designed to simulate the workings of the stock exchange. The unspoken assumption is that the precision and abstraction of the latter and the supposedly straightforwardly lust-filled former are conflated. The more these things claim to be about the human body, the more they are about reification.

Linkage (2)

Little Other, the blog of the organisation and organiser of the night Special Sounds in Greenwich, which I plugged perhaps a little too cryptically a couple of posts down. It was a fine occasion, nonetheless, with sets from Monster Bobby, Stuart Flynn and Xylitol combining crackling electronics and the seamier side of light entertainment to fine effect, in a suitably salubrious setting. Future events may involve philosophical cabaret and the potential return of Kino Fist from its employment-related slumber. Will plug further nearer the time.